“Tell everyone that there is still a place in the Kingdom of Romania which has not bowed to Communism. As long as our heads are on our shoulders, this corner of the country will be free. Tell the people not to lose faith, for the day will come when the whole of Romania will be free. Pray God for it, so help us God.” --Ioan Gavrila Ogoranu, Romanian anti-communist fighter 1923-2006

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Just a few more hours until the worldwide release of the music video filmed and directed by Transsylvania Phoenix Junior.

The video features Save Our City Band playing "Let It Out", a very inspired and catchy hard rock song. Save Our City is a local band of high school students; two of them are school colleagues of my son, T.P. Jr.

Their sound is really good and I hope they will stick together long enough to become filthy rich and incredibly famous.

My son did the video as an assignment for his movie making class he is taking during his college summer semester. It is a great clip done very professionally and I am not exaggerating one bit when I say both the music and the video are MTV/VH1 material.

Stay tuned, the Youtube video will be enabled tonight around 6:30 PM PST

Update: the standard definition video is up. Hi-def version is uploading right now.

Friday, August 7, 2009

As some have probably noticed, watching the media wear themselves out barking and snapping at the end of their chain at Sarah Palin has become a rather good spectator sport. Sometimes I play sportscaster here, for the amusement of those who enjoy the sport. Palin has become something of a morality play about the downfall of the Left, and that's good clean fun.

So it is today. We had a double-header last Saturday, one a simple demonstration of character and the other a morality play about political deftness and stupidity, but both breathtaking in their own way. The latter is particularly interesting, juxtaposed as it is beside one particular political folly of the Obama administration. Or, maybe that one is about character too. Maybe they're both connected. You, sportsfans, will have to decide.

What kept them too busy to take a swipe at their favorite victim? We'll see in Act II. But this particular episode of the ongoing national morality play appears to be about character--simple honesty and loyalty. It's best seen as the opposite of Freshman senator Gillibrand, who seems to have been extra busy shedding her gun-rights connections as fast as Carolyn McCarthy can tell her to. Why not? If you have to run over the whole state of NY, which in practice means anti-gun fortress New York City, it's the sensible thing to do.

Except--some people, non-politicians to be sure, might think that dishonest. In any rate, Sarah Palin having chosen to step onto the national stage from the Frozen wastelands of the North, seems to be choosing the opposite. I'm sure any political consultant would have told her to moderate her views, but perhaps this is simply an example of good political instincts: she could never shed the image of a gun-nut, not in the face of a homicidally insane dinosaur media. The Health Care bill is struggling over the problem of trying to please too many at one time--perhaps there is political wisdom in "dancing with the one that brung ya." It is certain that she could never earn the trust of anti-gun voters, so why risk losing the gunnies for nothing?

Or, it might not be political instincts. It might be that other thing, that outdated idea from Classical Ethics that you should be willing to suffer the consequences of being right and not be ashamed of what you believe and where you came from. Either way, it fairly takes the breath away: a politician deliberately and unabashedly going to a gun-collector function, speaking on Second Amendment rights, and accepting an NRA award. It is so flagrant a violation of the political rule of avoiding controversy and giving offense to anyone that it almost looks like a deliberate invitation to the media to attack.

But it most assuredly means this: Sarah Palin is not going to run away from gunnies for political purposes--she appears to be the anti-Gillibrand. Now, she cannot be the most pro-gun politician in American history; that history includes presidents like Jefferson, who told us that the great object is that every man be armed, Grant, a president of the NRA, and Kennedy, who said we should strive to again be a nation of riflemen. It would hardly be possible to be more pro-gun than the founding generation. But at this point, Sarah Palin may be the most pro-gun politician alive. At any rate, one would have to go outside the main party structure to the likes of Ron Paul to find a serious competitor.

But returning to the other suggestion: why would she invite the media to attack her? Why wave the red flag? Well, I don't really think she did--it would be consistent with her behavior to simply do what she likes and disregard the opinions of detractors. I think that's the real Sarah Palin, and a breathtaking level of disregard she has, too. But that very disregard seems to be at the heart of the Left's terminal case of Palin Derangement. They are the Philosopher Kings. She does not give deference. In Plato's Republic, that is a fatal error. They aren't that far yet, but their hatred of her shows how far they're willing to go in the name of hate and injured pride.

More than one ethical tradition names Pride as a particularly effective path to destruction. The Western tradition receives it from both parents--it is Homozygous for it, you might say. The Hebrews told us that Pride goes before a Fall. The Greeks said that those the Gods would destroy they first made proud. And the apostles told their Greek converts that Pride was the Original Sin. So Pride doesn't play well in that tradition. This first act in Saturday's Palin Play illustrates the source of the wounded pride of the Left; a Little Person, worse an *uneducated* person (which has nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with ideological certification) refuses to genuflect, and so spectacularly that the Philosopher Kings must crush her not as an opponent, but as a traitor who commits lese majeste. Not for practical reasons, but furiously, incoherently. And, perhaps in the terror that makes men lash out at shadows.

That bring us to Act II, on the theme of Pride and Fall.

The feature game was a bit different; the blogosphere went looking for a lamb and got torn to shreds by a lion. And we can learn a few things by how that happened.

The anti-Palin bloggers seem to have felt a distinct lack of Palin news, and perhaps despairing for a reason to get out of bed in the morning decided to just make some up. OK, well, outright lying is a normal day in the blogosphere, but you'd think they'd have learned back when they lied about the parentage of her baby and all the rest. However, you'd be wrong. Rational people learn from experience, and on the subject of Sarah Palin they are not only not rational, they are stark-staring mad. So like moths to a candle, they returned to her family life, which seems to exercise an unholy power over them. The lie this time was that she and Todd were breaking up.

What's the origin of this dark obsession with family life, so strong that it makes them lack even the human decency that prompted Barak Obama to say that family is off-limits? I think it lies in the sexual mythology of the left. There are many influences there, of course, some contradictory. A powerful one is the Radical Feminist theory that all sex is an exploitative exercise of power over another. There are few traditionalists as prudish as a certain kind of Feminist, as Camille Paglia is not shy to point out. A more popular variant is that it is any vestige of traditional marriage that is exploitative. This is nearly universal; repeated over and over again until it is not even a conscious meme is that the Right has cold, passionless, sterile relationships.

Now, the problem with Sarah Palin is that she threatens that idea; pretty much nobody believes she's one of the asexual women the left has so often put up for election. Worse is the dirty little secret that most of the left's iconic women got where they are because of a man (Hillary is a public figure because of Bill, and the list is astonishingly long from there), while Sarah Palin is genuinely, unquestionably self-made; Todd Palin is not a politician and leans toward the Alaska independence party.

So the other meme is invoked, one that comes from a bizzarely Leftist version of the Victorian woman: a female Conservative who isn't frigid is a slut. This is the constant theme running throughout all of the unseemly coverage of Palin's family. But you might have thought it might them from walking into the trap that the Divorce Lie led them into.

Perhaps the problem is that the left's theory about asexual marriages is in fact true in their experience? Bill Clinton, at least, might agree. And so, somehow, they didn't anticipate the political masterstroke that came when someone finally ran down an apparently bemused Sarah Palin and asked her about the whole thing. Perhaps it's because they'd spent so much time lying about the Palins that they drank their own kool-aid. Or, perhaps it's because we don't ever seem to see public figures who really appear to like their spouses. Perhaps they expected yet another of those polite, ham-fisted denials that never, ever work. Perhaps they expected that they could keep this game going for weeks, enjoying the ever-more-strident and ever-less-believable public denials. Instead, what they got their heads handed to them on a platter:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sarah Palin

Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I'm not blind!

That may be the most brilliant line we'll see for a long time. Denials never work; we've seen that time and time again that "I love my wife/husband" does nothing to stop the rumors. So what she said was different, something we simply have not heard from a politician and above all a female politician: she said, in essence, "I think my husband is hot."

And that brings us to one of the most interesting, politically incendary things about Sarah Palin: she likes men. Thanks to the Cultural Revolutionaries of the left, we now have a culture that hates men. Television is drowning in the dual image of men as either castrated or evil. Sarah Palin threatens that image, above all because she seems to genuinely like men as men. Being the husband of the governor is almost certain to be the most castrating job in Alaska--unless you happen to be a multiple Iron Dog champion and fishing-boat skipper. At that point, you can wear a unitard and still be manly. And that, it seems, is the kind of man Sarah Palin likes.

Name me *one* woman on the left happily, unapologetically married to a similar man.

I've said before that this is another aspect of Sarah Palin that is endlessly threatening to the left. It isn't primarily women that she attracts--its men. And not because of the left's smear that she looks like a "slutty flight attendent," a sexist pig attitude that they've spread as far as they can. It's because she likes them and doesn't tell them they should be castrated for the good of society.

My guess is that, push come to shove, quite a few of them would die for her. Nothing threatens the left as much as a woman who commands respect because she gives it. If that sort of thing became common, the left would have no gender-theory left. And that's my guess as to why they'll never be able to avoid walking into that kind of trap; because they simply can't imagine what a strong, self-made woman who likes men and chooses to surround herself with them and their environment instead of blaming them for her own shortcomings would think like.

They're right to fear her like the devil. Even moderate and left-leaning men tend to appreciate not being blamed for everything. She has to be stopped and neutralized lest too many of them start to like being treated like men instead of half-domesticated animals. They might enjoy an environment without hate.

And that's the bases-loaded home run that ended Saturday's double-header. Until next time, your humble sportscaster remains....

Sunday, August 2, 2009

This is the trailer of a movie that harvested a bunch of film festival awards including Palm D'or but it will never be presented on the big screen in America - it would be impossible because of the people who run Hollywood are slobbering over Obama and would consider this movie "dangerous". Hovever, I hope someone at FOX hears about it and they will pay the rights to have it broadcasted as a Sunday 2 part special.

The movie is called "The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu" and it's a (very) dark Romanian comedy about an old man with a drinking problem and his tribulations in the state run medical system.After literally an entire night of being sent by ambulance from one hospital to another (I believe 6 hospitals in total) where doctors and medical personnel are overworked, underpaid and completely disinterested in the medical act, Mr. Lazarescu finally dies on a stretcher, victim of a state-run medical system that is as compassionate and caring as the DMV. This film is a cautionary tale against the ills of socialized medicine: people die and nobody cares. What defines this movie is its incredible realism and if seen by enough Americans would cause Obamacare to fail miserably.